Xn turns two hours into two minutes for North Lincs

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Time is the one thing every manager wants more of, and when you're running public sports facilities, the time involved in simply generating the data for the inevitable reports can make a big hole in your week. But in its partnership with Xn, North Lincs has found a simple and highly cost-effective way around the problem, and it's turned 3-4 hours of Nick Over's Admin team's week into a simple task that takes just a few minutes. With the APSE (Association of Public Service Excellence) reports set to add to the reporting challenge faced by every local authority, Cascade is proving itself to be a very well timed solution.

Cascade: turbo-charging the existing Xn software systems

Besides the five large Sports and Leisure Centres under North Lincolnshire's control, Sports Facilities Manager Nick Over is responsible for the reports that need to be generated for several outdoor facilities and a stadium as well. Pulling together all the footfall and utilisation data can be very time-consuming, as Nick knows only too well; he has to generate at least two reports a week that used to take a couple of hours each until he was able to take advantage of Xn's Cascade system.

Now, something that used to take half a day a week takes little more than a couple of minutes to generate, and Nick can devote more time to all the other things he's got to do: "The reports have to be very detailed about usage and income, and while it's all essential information, it used to mean I spent a significant amount of my time every week on data gathering rather than managing."

"The development of Cascade in conjunction with the Xn software has had a phenomenal impact on the time saved, and because it's effectively a bolt-on application, we've been able to turbo-charge our existing Xn software systems."

Complex data gathering made quick and easy

The sheer volume of management data that one Centre can generate in a week is huge, yet Cascade reduces the task of collecting it and turning it into the reports Nick needs with consummate ease: "Our biggest site typically has around 330,000 visits a year, or put another way 6,000 and more people a week that we need to keep track of when they visit."

"We need to account for all their course fees, casual sessions and retail sales, and do so without the aid of an Active Card but via a mix of registered Direct Debit users, ie. memberships, booking cards and concession users, and the casual 'pay as you go' visitors who use cash and register at the front desk. Then add in all the other facilities under my control, and you've got a huge amount of data to have to plough through - and that's where Cascade comes in."

Data manipulation in a new league

Nick particularly likes the new features of data manipulation that Cascade has introduced to his reporting: "Aside of saving me a lot of time every week, the quality of the reports I can now generate is impressive. Cascade not only trawls through things very quickly, but manipulates the information and data I need, by letting me drill down very easily. It's just a matter of dragging the appropriate field across."

"So for example, if I wanted to know the attendance of a particular fitness suite, I can not only establish the overall level, but I can look down into the various ways that figure was generated by checking out all the different types of sessions. So if it was say 5,000 attendances, I can also tell you very quickly what the number of casual, Direct Debit and GP referral users were. That's already enabled a major improvement in the quality of our reporting."

North Lincs and Cascade: saves management time, improves reporting quality

Nick Over is thoroughly impressed with the impact of putting Xn's Cascade software to work at North Lincs: "We're doing things far more efficiently now. Xn has helped us at North Lincs to take a big step forward, by helping us generate much higher quality reports, much more quickly."

With everything else that he has to do in a typically over-busy week in public sports management, Cascade is just the kind of added value that managers like Nick Over need from their IT partner.